I don’t know about you, but I’ve never had any trouble eating watercress. I’ve always enjoyed its peppery kick, the ferrous bite of its leaves and fresh crunch of its stalks. Indeed, I’d go so far as to describe it as the perfect salad leaf.

But while I’ve been happily munching away, a large swath of the nation has not. Apparently, the so-called “Ermintrude effect” has put off would-be watercress eaters in their thousands. Some people find it very difficult to deal with delicately, and end up with stalks sticking out of the corners of their mouths in an unattractive, four-legged-ruminant kind of way.

According to Turnbull, a company named Steve’s Leaves is now producing “fork-friendly” baby watercress.

Those unfamiliar with Ermintrude can see her in the clip below; she is the one in the blue hat, beating a drum.

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About

Schott’s Vocab is a repository of unconsidered lexicographical trifles — some serious, others frivolous, some neologized, others newly newsworthy.
Each day, Schott's Vocab explores news sites around the world to find words and phrases that encapsulate the times in which we live or shed light on a story of note. If language is the archives of history, as Emerson believed, then Schott’s Vocab is an attempt to index those archives on the fly.

Ben Schott is the author of “Schott’s Original Miscellany,” its two sequels, and the yearbook “Schott’s Almanac.” He is a contributing columnist to The Times’s Op-Ed page. He lives in London and New York.